Make Everything Versionable

What I'm working on next.

Background

Teams are using more SaaS tools than ever—stitching them together then scaling them is a challenge. I’ve written about this before and called the challenge SaaS debt, a state in which the time it takes to maintain these tools grows exponentially with rising complexity.

What is SaaS debt?

It’s a problem I’ve seen across data, marketing, engineering, sales—really all over. Engineering teams have a bit of a leg up in this respect with tools like Terraform that can transform any configuration into declarative code, which is then versioned in Github.

It’s a burden on analytics teams to learn Terraform to simply version configuration, and a non-starter for operational teams for obvious reasons. Why not make versioning configuration more accessible? It would allow more people to QA, test via dry-run, and peer review changes to important workflows leading to fewer errors in production user experiences.

No Code is the Future

That’s why we’re building Versionable.

Where we’re going

The SaaS industry is blowing up.

Source for image, inspired by Digital Native

There is a growing number of complex tools used by non-engineering teams (analytics, marketing, sales) that scale to affect real production end-customers. Using all these tools in tandem can become extremely hard to manage, creating support operational functions solely for this purpose (Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, Data Ops).

At the same time, more people are becoming technical or code-adjacent. The barrier to entry to coding well, however, is still too high. There is no straightforward way for the average person to actually make use of the principles of building scalable systems outside of learning to code. Intertwining SaaS tools is a system in itself that is becoming extremely time consuming to scale.

We are starting with access to and between tools across the tech stack for data teams, who are already familiar with Github’s existence. Our vision is that any team, technical or not, can version-control and peer-review any changes made across SaaS tools.

Readers: what this means

Unfortunately, that means writing weekly has dropped a bit in priority for me. As I said in my last post, I will always write (I have too much to say not to!). For now, it’ll just have to be on a less frequent basis.

In the meantime, I’d love to chat about what we’re building and why we’re building it. Please get in touch at sarah@versionable.io.